Wealday, Desnues 4th, evening

The walk back to the house—it looks like a house, it’s functionally a house, and “house” sounds better than “mine office”, so ergo, it’s a house—seemed longer than the one to the cairn. In part that was because we were tired from the long day, but mostly it was the feeling of defeat. When we left in the morning, I was fairly optimistic about returning to a place that was, on some level, familiar. I was eager to explore, excited by the possibilities it offered, and confident in our skills. And why wouldn’t I be? Between us we could fight, overcome obstacles with logic and skill, perform wonders through magic, and call upon the gods for grace and mercies. And yet, despite those varied talents, here we were, walking solemnly and silently back, as dogs with tails between our legs, battered and bruised. And all we had to show for our efforts were a few trinkets, mostly taken from those who had tried before us, and failed more thoroughly.

And then there was the crumbling remains of Masi’s old bedroll in my pack. I had last seen it, what, five years ago? The last time I had seen her. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do with it. There was no family to give it to, no grave for it to be buried in. Burning it or just tossing it out like trash felt wrong. Burying it in the wilderness would probably be the best way to honor her memory, but it would bury the answer to the question of what had happened to her, too. So what to do with it? Take it back to town, I guess. Give it to (as much as it pains me to say it) the Sheriff, so that the story her life wouldn’t end in a question mark. Of course, that would also open myself, and my companions, up to questions of our own and unwanted prying eyes. Knowing the Sheriff, it would probably also end in some form of extortion or blackmail.

The truth is still the truth, though, even when it’s inconvenient and poorly timed and it needed to be told. On the other hand, it’s also been five years, give or take, and there isn’t anyone still searching for her. Sitting on the answer to a question that no one is asking for a few more days or weeks would not do anyone any harm.

What it really comes down to, I guess, is that I don’t know what Masi really would have wanted for herself. Or what her parents would have wanted.

And what about my companions? As we learned today, what we are doing is dangerous. If something happened to one of us, what would we do? And that got me to thinking. While Snagsby and Zhog were busy using magic to make small repairs around the house, I pulled out some parchment—I never go anywhere without something to write on and something to write with—and worked up some simple legal documents, so we could all express our wishes in the event we don’t survive this. It’s an ugly subject, one most didn’t want to talk about, but given the realities of the day it was a discussion we needed to have.

Sharing a living space with a number of people you don’t really know all that well is an enlightening experience, whether you are seeking enlightenment or not. One of the first things Zhog did, for example, was string a hammock between two structural pillars on the second floor. Yes, that second floor, the one with the gaping holes in the roof.

“OK, I admit I am curious,” I said as stepped off the stairs. “Why up here?”

“I spend my nights in a brewer’s cellar,” he answered as he tied off the second strap. “Don’t want to sleep on the floor here, too. And I haven’t slept under the open sky since I came to Diamond Lake.” Right. Follower of Desna. And, nephew of Kullen, a man not known for the comforts of home.

After dinner (which sounds more formal than it was, which was us just eating whatever non-perishable rations we had brought with us), Zhog said some prayer to Desna and his bucket filled with two gallons of some sort of ale. I watched as he drank the whole thing down, spilling a bit here and there in his enthusiasm to finish it off. It was another reminder of why I don’t drink a lot. Abadar doesn’t forbid alcohol, of course, or even frown on it if it’s done in moderation, but the key words there are “in moderation”, and drinking is one of those vices that is prone to excess. This is especially a problem in Diamond Lake, where if there’s one thing we have an excess of, it’s excess. I find it easier just to abstain. More than one person has tried to be clever by pointing out that I used to work in a tavern. Yeah, well, what of it? A person’s got to eat, and there aren’t that many options for work in town, especially for a woman. While I never enjoyed dealing with obviously drunk patrons, I’ll take the tavern over the brothel any day.

The evening fell into a pattern of idle chatter, and this is where I am most at ease. The conversation broke up into small groups, as it invariably does. Viktor and Varin were talking magic and spells. Zhog and Snagsby spoke of making it to a real city (for reasons that should be obvious, Snagsby was of the opinion that Kaer Maga didn’t count), and all the things such a thing offers. If I believe half the things that were said, places like Korvosa are paved in gold, all manner of humanity is welcomed with open arms, and untold riches are to be had for those willing to work for them.

Color me skeptical. While there are likely kernels of truth in these fantasies, cities are still made of people, and people and are probably not that much different from one place to another. I imagine large cities simply provide more places for the worst of them to hide.

That being said, that is so far above where we live now that it’s hard not to indulge. Korvosa may still have its slums, but I am reasonably sure they don’t comprise the whole town.

Oathday, Desnus 5th (early morning)

Sera woke me early for our shift on watch. This was more or less like old times, except we couldn’t spend the two hours talking lest we wake everyone in the house.

Watch duty is pretty dull, which is of course how you want it to go. It’s a lot of standing around, walking around, sitting around, looking at nothing and hoping it stays that way. When I would camp out by myself a few years back, it wasn’t really possible to spend the whole night awake, much less awake and on alert, so I had to get creative. That mostly came down to finding a good, defensible location, masking my scent, and discouraging wildlife. In a group of seven you can watch for surprises. In a group of one, you don’t want them at all.

(late morning)

The day back at the Cairn started with a long, methodical search of every inch of the walls from the entrance to the sarcophagus. If you think watch duty is dull, try spending an hour around people who are caressing stone walls like they are rediscovering a forgotten lover. I get that all this is important and that we may have missed something yesterday, but some of what they were doing might actually count as foreplay. It was almost enough to make me uncomfortable.

When they reached the central chamber, Zhog had finally had enough and came over to me. “Let’s try pushing on that thing and see if it moves.”

I mean, why not? His theory was that either the head or the feet were meant to point in a certain direction and if that was so, then the sarcophagus might rotate. It was better than getting intimate with the walls.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s give it a go.”

We both crouched down to put our weight into it, and gave it a push. It took a couple of tries, but sure enough it started to give. We pushed harder and the sarcophagus swung 45 degrees counter clockwise before locking into place. The head was now pointing towards where the red lamp would have been if we had the red lamp.

“Look down the halls and see if anything has changed,” I called out to the others. They spent a few minutes searching each one, and as near as anyone could tell, there was nothing different about them.

“Let’s try again,” I said to Zhog.

We gave it another shove, and it rotated again so that the head was pointing towards the entrance. There was still no change that anyone could see, so we kept at it: there were still five more positions to try before it came back to its original orientation.

Two more rotations put the head pointing towards the indigo lamp, and then we heard a grinding sound from beneath us as the hall rumbled. A five foot diameter cylinder rose up out of the floor directly underneath the indigo lamp where the hall dead-ended. It was tall enough for a person to stand in, and based on the crushed bones and rotting fabric that was inside, someone had already tried to do so.

This is the sort of thing that says “obvious trap”. Our brief time with the cairn, though, has made us suspicious enough that we wanted to test the theory, because not all obvious things are obvious. Well, so far, the one obvious thing has been obvious, but “one” isn’t a big number, so it was best not to just assume. Since no one wanted to bet their life on it, we put a waterskin in there instead, and sent the cylinder down, then brought it back up.

Short answer: definitely a trap.

Two more rotations pointed the head down the hall towards the green lantern. Another cylinder started to rise under that one, too, but it didn’t make it far before it stopped. We heard a loud banging followed by repeated popping and what might have been straining and shearing metal as the ground in the hallway started to shake. Zhog and I quickly pushed the sarcophagus to the next position, and it all stopped as the cylinder sunk back into the floor.

“Let’s save that one for last.”

We were now pointing towards the hall with the yellow lantern, where a third cylinder had risen up from the floor. This one looked clear: no bones, no sign of any traps, just a human-sized chamber that was apparently some soft of elevator.

I’ve not seen many elevators, and none that looked like this. Some of the larger mines use them to take people and ore in and out. Around town, a few places have one for moving heavy loads up and down. All of them use ropes attached to a counterweight via a pulley system, and someone has to pull on the rope to make it go. This one had no visible mechanism of any sort.

With the experience of the last two elevators fresh in our minds, we repeated some experiments before stepping in ourselves. Once it was clear it wasn’t just crushing anything inside, or dropping it fast enough to cause injury, Snagsby volunteered to ride it down. He surprised us by coming back up on his own.

“There’s a button down there, and when you press it, the cylinder comes back up,” he said. Which was convenient, as we were trying to figure out how to go down without leaving someone behind. Or being trapped underground for the rest of our lives.

Details.

One at a time, we entered the cylinder and descended to the chamber below, exiting into a small anteroom whose walls were lined with bas-reliefs of human figures done in the same style of the carving on the sarcophagus. Each hairless, sexless figure was seven feet tall, and posed as though paying deference to us. Some of the carvings came far enough out of the wall to practically be separate statues, and several of these were missing their arms, heads, and any other body part that was easily broken off. More evidence that others have been here before us.

Why would someone steal a stone arm or head from a wall? I can’t imagine there is a huge market for statue limbs, so I figured it was done out of frustration. The only other exit from the room was blocked by a large, stone slab that was standing on its end. It looked as though it could be pushed over, but again, this seemed like an obvious trap. I bet most of the would-be thieves that made it this far thought the same, and decided that a stone hand was as good as they were going to get.

Fortunately, we have Sera with us, and she was able to disable a pressure plate that the stone was sitting on. She said it was set to trigger something when the weight of the stone was removed. With the plate disabled, we could safely, albeit very loudly, push it over.

Where Sera learned this sort of thing is a bit of mystery, and not something that she really talks about. After the Night Walkers disbanded, she put her skills to use by starting a business for herself, doing I’m-not-exactly-sure-what. She always spoke of it rather vaguely. “Sometimes, people need to have things done without attracting a lot of attention,” she said to me once. “I know the town, and I can navigate it in the dark. That lets me be discreet.” She never bothered explaining what “things” meant, or who “people” were, and why attention was an issue. I didn’t ask. The less I know, the better. But I am pretty sure it goes beyond her childhood pastime of picking the locks to the rooms of the inn that her parents manage.

The hallway beyond was lined with alcoves, each containing a statue of another sexless figure, their arms stretched outward and their hands cupped as if holding or offering something. We were giving them a closer look when I saw a pair of eyeballs joined by connective tissue float out into the hall.

There are a lot strange things in and around Diamond Lake. The lake itself has been polluted for so long that the only fish that seem to live in there are the gar, a predatory species with razor-sharp teeth that can be as long as a man is tall, and some longer than that. The hinterlands have their share of wildlife, including unnaturally large and aggressive forms of wolves, boars, and bears. And enough people have claimed to see ghouls that these stories are generally accepted to be true (though clearly they haven’t seen ghouls up close, since they lived to speak of it). What we don’t have a lot of is floating eyeballs. Or any. We don’t have any floating eyeballs. I am pretty sure I would have heard about something like that.

One eye looked at Sera, and she turned and bolted as if in fear for her life. I’ve never seen Sera afraid of, well, anything, and this oddity was more gross and curious than scary, so I assumed that magic was involved. Then the other eye tried to get a bead on me. I felt something try to take hold, but I was able to shake it off.

You would think a pair of floating eyeballs would be an easy target, but it was small and  surprisingly agile, and that made it difficult to smack the thing. Viore managed to hit it with a magical bolt of some sort, while slings and arrows sailed harmlessly by. I swung my blade twice and missed both times. Then it made the same mistake just about everything has made since our adventure began: it moved inside the arc of my horsechopper where it thought it was safe.

Surprise, Mr. Eyeballs! Have a good look at my armor spikes as they are slamming into you.

After that, Varin caught it with a crossbow bolt, the eyes dropped to the ground, and that was that. The spell that struck Sera apparently wore off in the meantime, and she got back just in time to watch us make sure it was dead. By squashing it under our feet.

The hallway led to a large room built around a huge, square central pillar of stone. The north end was bitter cold and the floor there was covered in a brown mold that I believe someone said was actually called brown mold. Other than the name, we knew nothing about it, but it seemed like something that we did not want to touch. The closer we got to it, the colder it became until it was so impossibly cold that it felt as though our flesh would freeze. Once again, we put it on the list to deal with later.

“Later” was shaping up to be great deal of fun.

The south end had more evidence that would-be grave robbers were here many years before us. A Large stone block had fallen and crushed someone next to the central pillar. There was a latch that reset the trap and raised the block back to the ceiling, and it revealed the crushed remains of a display case, and the crushed remains of the body that attempted to steal from it. The chainmail it had been wearing was completely unscathed, however, which suggested that it was enchanted. Sera disabled the trigger—again, don’t want to know how she knows so much about pressure plates—and we retrieved the armor.

It occurred to me that part of our success has been people dying before us. Were we looking at multiple individuals, or a group like ourselves that simply lost people as they went along, until the only one left alive was the one who had only stone limbs broken off of statues to show for their trouble?

While our group has been exceedingly cautious since yesterday’s events, there is no denying that it helps to have deadly traps pointed out to you in advance. I suppose one could say, correctly, that much of the challenge has been removed because of this, but I like living and prefer to spend a great deal of time doing that, so I don’t care. We are not here to feed our egos. The fewer deadly traps we have to find on our own, the better.

With a bedroom to the south, a dry fountain in the west side of the central pillar, and what looked like an old privy beyond that, this was starting to feel like it was someone’s private quarters. The only room left to explore was to the north, and required that we travel through the brown mold.

Snagsby threw some oil on it and used a spell to spark it to flame, and the mold almost instantly doubled in size. This was obviously progress in the wrong direction.

“I think it feeds on heat,” I said. It was a guess, but if you consider cold to be the absence of heat, then a creature that chills the air around it by drawing in heat, instead of living where it is cold, made a certain kind of sense. Varin took that as an invitation to hit it with a blast of freezing cold, and the mold died almost as quickly as it had grown.

The final room was something of a workshop, containing worktables, vises, a spinning wheel for cutting, and blocks of unfinished marble, among other things. Our theory is that the craftsman who made this place, or at least designed it, created this area as their personal space. Thinking back to the bas-reliefs in the anteroom, those figures were paying deference to someone, and that also suggested the builder had a rather high opinion of themselves.

We ascended back to the main level and considered the sole, remaining passageway, the one where the green lantern was hung. We now knew that there were chambers below, and we had seen the small elevator rise up, or at least make an attempt of it. The cacophony of metal, stone, and gears, lacked the subtlety of the rest of this place which suggested that it wasn’t a trap, but rather a legitimate mechanism that had succumbed to age.

Everyone backed away to a safe distance as Zhog and I swung the sarcophagus to the green light. The cylinder tried to rise again and stuck as before, only this time we let events run their course. The ground shook, and with a great sound of shearing of metal the stone cylinder dropped away, and the floor collapsed around it leaving a gaping pit tens of feet deep.

The dust settled in silence, but the calm did not last. A chittering sound of a mass of insects rose from the depths, and we backed away just before a massive swarm of beetles erupted into the hall followed closely by a giant eyeball walking on spidery legs.

Flasks of oil flew from behind me as I crossed over to Sera where she confronted the spider. Snagsby used a spell to ignite the slick into flames, and half of the swarm was caught in it as the other climbed the wall. With Sera’s help, I cleaved the spider in two but the beetles just flowed towards our friends. I saw Viore and Zhog get overrun, and each ran out of the mass, frantically swiping and swatting beetles off their bodies. Viore looked ill, and Zhog nearly so.

“This isn’t working!” I yelled as the implacable insects continued their advance. They were too numerous to die in the fire and too small to strike at with weapons. We were tired, and our spell casters were spent, so we ran for the exit.

The beetles surged out from the cairn far behind us, and quickly broke up into smaller groups that started feeding on the vegetation on the hillside. If we had been closer to farmlands this might have been a disaster in the making, but no one would ever confuse Diamond Lake and the surrounding landscape for anything resembling fertile soil. None of these beetles would live long enough to destroy anything of value.

For the second time, we walked back to the house in silence.